


The Cartography of Feeling

by Sholio



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Cage Fights, Friendship, Gen, Gladiators, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, Psychic Bond, Queerplatonic Relationships, Undead Owen Harper, background levels of Jack/Ianto
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:42:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25441081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: "We're sodding gladiators," Owen said. "Fuck this entire day and Jack Harkness too."(Or: Owen and Ianto are abducted by aliens and forced to arena-fight. But the worst part might be the control device that connects them in an emotion and pain-sharing bond.)
Relationships: Owen Harper & Ianto Jones
Comments: 13
Kudos: 85
Collections: Eat Drink and Make Merry 2020





	The Cartography of Feeling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> This was sparked by the idea of Owen being able to eat again by experiencing someone else's sensations of eating, and that's certainly in here, but the plot on the whole got away from me rather badly.

The first thing Ianto saw when he opened his eyes was Owen.

"Okay, first of all, don't panic," Owen said. Ianto shut his eyes again.

"Nothing good ever follows anyone saying that," he muttered.

He heaved a sigh and cracked his eyes open again. All he could see from this angle was a scarred, unpainted metal ceiling. He felt ... _weird_ : dizzy, dissociated, strange. His head hurt, and one of his feet was twisted at an awkward angle so the top of the shoe was digging into his ankle. And yet, in some unnerving way, he couldn't quite feel it properly; his entire body was dull, achy, like it was hardly connected to him. He was also extremely tense and on edge.

"Uh, yeah, that's me," Owen said. "Sorry."

Ianto turned his head, mustering up a puzzled frown. This brought more of the room into view, but wasn't any more helpful at figuring out where they were. It was a metal box maybe fifteen feet square, lit by some kind of flat-panel lighting in the ceiling. The floor looked filthy and the whole place smelled rank. There was something under his head, which he realized was Owen's jacket. He was oddly touched.

"What?" he said, finally.

Owen held up his hand. There was a band around his wrist, some kind of metal cuff with a glowing violet light on it. It reminded Ianto somewhat of the device they'd had Owen wear when he was transforming into a gateway for Death — and, with a more intense pang, of Jack's vortex manipulator.

"Yeah, don't start with that. You've got one too," Owen added, nodding to Ianto's left hand.

Startled, Ianto raised his hand. It was light enough that it didn't particularly weigh his arm down, a cuff of some kind of dark metal like tarnished silver, about three inches wide and fitted snuggly to his wrist. Other than the violet light, there was no other sign of machinery or any sort of catch. He tugged on it.

"Won't come off," Owen said. "Trust me, I tried. They put it on us both while —"

"They?" Ianto said, alarmed. He started struggling to sit up.

"I said don't panic," Owen snapped. "Because if you do, _we'll_ panic. And I've already been through that. So let's not."

"What?" Ianto had managed to get himself sitting up, although he wanted to touch the filthy floor as little as possible. His headache spiked, and at the same time he felt a flare of annoyance and —

Oh.

"Is this making me feel what you're feeling?" he asked, staring at it. It was funny how working for Torchwood made the most bizarre things relatively easy to accept. After you'd seen one of your coworkers having her life drained by a second one, another coworker reading people's minds, and multiple people you worked with coming back from the dead, an empathy wristband was relatively simple.

"And vice versa," Owen said. "Goes both ways. I wasn't sure of that 'til you woke up."

So the strange, chill, unresponsive feeling in his limbs was Owen's undeath. Good Lord, did Owen feel that way all the time? It was significantly more awful than he'd thought, to the extent he'd thought about it at all.

Ianto also felt a flutter of ruthlessly suppressed terror which he was pretty sure wasn't his own. Not that he didn't have plenty of his own to go around, but this had a different, angrier flavor. There was a bitter taste to Owen's thoughts, like the aftertaste of some dark, astringent liquor.

"If you don't want me panicking, maybe try not panicking yourself," Ianto said, the combination of fear mixed with Owen's annoyance making him unusually testy.

"I _am_ trying!" Owen snapped. "And it's easy for you to say. You've only just woke up; you haven't seen _them_ yet."

"Also, if me not panicking is your aim, perhaps you could be more specific about who 'they' are."

"I'm not sure if describing them will make you _less_ panicked."

"Not helping!" Ianto said, now feeling himself teetering on the brink of a full-blown panic attack. There was a sort of feedback spiral going on between him and Owen now, he realized, with their individual fear feeding the other's emotions. He struggled to force it down before it could get completely out of control, and was distantly aware of Owen doing the same, until Owen's panic abruptly spiked again.

"You can't read my mind, can you?" Owen said.

"What? God, no! Why?" Ianto asked in horror. "Can you read mine?"

"No, no — just feelings. I wanted to make sure."

"No, at least I don't think so." He prodded at the band again. "Getting back to who's taken us ... where _are_ we?"

"What's the last thing you remember?" Owen said.

Everything recent was a blur. Ianto rubbed his hand across his face, and there was a sharp intake of breath from Owen, making Ianto drop his hand and look at him. "What?"

"Oh, that's weird." Owen touched his own face briefly, reflexively. "I can feel what you're feeling, and it's ... a lot, that's all. Could you do that again?"

Ianto had actually been about to do it again; now he dropped his hands into his lap. "What? No! Stop making this even weirder than it already is, and _tell me where we are."_

"We've been abducted by aliens, basically," Owen said. "But you probably figured out that part on your own."

He hadn't, but now that Owen mentioned it, he remembered nighttime, darkness, the ripple of lights on water ... "We were investigating UFO sightings out along the waterfront," he said slowly. "There was a light."

"Yeah, Jack would probably have taken one look and rattled off something like 'oh, mid-41st century tractor beam, disrupt it with a bit of washing-up liquid, nothing to it really' —" He actually did a remarkably good imitation of Jack's accent. "But since Jack's not sodding here, we ended up in some kind of bloody huge intake area. They were really surprised to see me awake. I guess what happened to you was the normal thing, just passing out for a few hours." 

There was a surge of emotion along with this that startled Ianto — worry, distress, and anger. He was feeling Owen's memory of it, and the worry was for him. He was unexpectedly flattered, but that was swept away almost immediately in a hot flare of rage that wasn't his own.

"Stay out of my fucking head," Owen snapped.

"I can't help it," Ianto pointed out. He held himself in check, intentionally, deliberately; of the two of them, he had by far the better emotional control, which might be the only thing that got them through this. "Look, we're going to have to deal with this until we get out of here. And you _still_ haven't told me what kind of aliens have us."

"Oh, right, that." Owen looked away; Ianto could feel the anger drain away as quickly as it had come, or at least most of it did. From the feel of things, Owen was never _not_ angry. "Yeah, I don't know what they are, actually. They're nothing I've seen in the Torchwood files, but that hardly means anything; there must be heaps of them out there we've never seen. Sort of like a crocodile crossed with a lorry."

"Lovely." Ianto tugged at the wristband again. He couldn't help it, like an animal caught in a trap, gnawing at it.

"They took all my kit, and our weapons. Even the car keys."

"Could you understand anything at all that they said?" Ianto asked.

"Once they put the bracelets on us, yeah." Owen ran his fingertips over the one on him. Ianto felt it, but strangely, at even more of a remove than Owen's emotions. Owen could definitely feel things with his undead body, but it was muted. He could feel the texture of it, the pressure, but not much in the way of heat or cold. "They did them in pairs for everyone," he went on.

"Other humans?"

"No, aliens. We were the only humans there, that I could see." He tapped the cuff with his fingernail. "These come in sets of two. They separated each pair and put them on a pair of ... whatever we are. Research subjects, breeding pairs ..."

"If they think that's what we are, they're in for a surprise."

"Yeah, should've been you and Jack."

"He'll find us," Ianto said. He got to his feet, trying to touch the floor as little as possible with any part of his body beyond the soles of his shoes. This suit was probably already a lost cause, but that didn't mean he had to make it worse.

"Yeah," Owen said noncommittally, retrieving his jacket. Ianto could feel his mix of skepticism and a kind of deep, intense hope, both of which Ianto could also feel him shoving down and covering up with prickly anger. "Go investigate the mysterious lights at the pier, it'll be easy, probably nothing but jet liners flying into the airport, you'll be done and home early ... sodding Jack Harkness ..."

Leaving Owen muttering to himself and trying to brush filth off his jacket, Ianto wandered around their cell. It had few features, and none that looked like they could be used to effect an escape. There was wire mesh over the light in the ceiling, and it was too high to reach in any case. He couldn't even figure out which wall contained the door; they all seemed to be made of the same scarred and stained metal.

There were no blankets, beds, or other niceties. There was a hole in the floor in the corner, its purpose obvious (and made even more obvious by the horrifying stains around it), and a sink, tall enough to be slightly uncomfortable for a human but not impossible to reach. Ianto figured out how to turn it on after poking at it — actually it worked just like some public sinks and toilets on Earth, with motion sensors. When he put his hand under the water, it turned out to be ice cold.

There was a startled noise and a spike of some indefinable emotion from Owen.

"What?" Ianto asked, turning quickly. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, yes ... fine. Just startled me, that's all." Owen flexed his hand — the right hand, the same one Ianto had put under the water.

"Well, you'd best get used to it because I'm not going to narrate my every move to avoid surprising you."

"No, it's not that, exactly." Owen hesitated, and the emotional feeling coming from him was a roiling mix of nervousness, embarrassment, and (unsurprisingly) anger. Various emotions warred for dominance before he went on, pushing past the reluctance: "I think I'm feeling more ... intensity, I guess, than what you're feeling. Not anything to do with the link. Just because I'm not used to feeling anything at all."

"Oh," was all Ianto could say. He looked at his wet hand. It had just been cold water, nothing special. But Owen hadn't had any kind of physical sensation, beyond very basic ones, in months.

Ianto remembered vividly how much of a shock Jack touching him had been, after Lisa — after he'd grown used to touching no one at all. And at least he'd had full sensation in the rest of his life; he just hadn't touched _people._ He could still enjoy a cup of coffee, the sun on his face, the brush of clean sheets on his skin.

"So are you going to shag that sink or drink from it?" Owen asked. "Just curious, mind you."

Owen was ... eager. That was a strange feeling, especially when it was about something as prosaic as getting a drink of water. But that was something else Owen hadn't had in months.

Uncomfortably aware of Owen voyeuristically hovering in the back of his mind, at least the physical-sensation part of it, Ianto scooped up a cupped handful of water and drank. It was cold and tasted faintly tinny.

Owen's bliss was almost orgasmic. Now Ianto was the one who felt like a voyeur; there were waves of blissed-out _joy_ coming from Owen as he savored every instant of the cold water sliding down Ianto's throat.

"If this makes me sick, you're going to regret this link," Ianto said, trying to defuse the ... _everything_ that was currently in the air between them, and managed to startle a laugh out of Owen.

* * *

It didn't make him sick, but as time wore on and no one came, it also wasn't a substitute for food. His stomach cramped with hunger. He was aware of Owen feeling that, too, perhaps more fiercely than Ianto was, given what Owen had said earlier about the intensity of sensation. Naturally, being Owen, he sublimated it into anger and began pacing their cell.

They had been stripped of everything but their clothes. Watches, phones, Torchwood kit: all were gone. The light in the cell never dimmed or wavered. Telling the passage of time was impossible. Ianto figured from how hungry he was getting that it had been at least a few hours since their kidnapping. (He refused to use the word "abduction," especially with "alien" in front of it.)

"Jack can show up any time now, you know," Owen said. "If he's coming at all." In between circuits of the cell he kept stopping to examine the sink, the light, and the toilet hole, which were the three things in the cell there were to look at, interspersed with bouts of trying to figure out how to get the wristband off.

"I'll be sure and tell him you said that." Ianto was starting to find that Owen's constant low-level irritation sawed at his nerves and his patience. Granted, there was plenty about this situation to be annoyed with, but the least Owen could do was stop looking for new things to annoy him.

"Oh, stop it," Owen said.

"Stop what?" _You absolute wanker,_ he added in his head. Owen's pacing was driving him mad.

"Being irritated with me! I can feel it! Like any of this is my fault!"

This was the height of hypocrisy, given the amount of irritation that Ianto had been feeling from Owen for the entire time they'd been in the cell. "Et tu, Brute?" he muttered.

"Are you seriously quoting Shakespeare at me?"

"What I mean is, if you're annoyed about _me_ being annoyed, maybe you could try exercising a modicum of emotional restraint yourself —"

"Oh, fuck off," Owen said. "Go shove your emotional restraint down the bog."

"Why, of all people, did it have to be you?"

"I was just thinking the same thing."

Before things could escalate further, the door abruptly opened. It didn't swing; it slid, vanishing seamlessly into the wall, and an enormous shape loomed in the thus-revealed doorway, half again the height of an ordinary-sized human.

Owen's description of the aliens as a cross between a crocodile and a lorry was pretty accurate, Ianto thought. He didn't like to judge books by their covers, but he'd rather tangle with an entire team of thoroughly pissed footballers than one of these guys.

"Well, well," the crocolorry said in a voice like a bag of rocks rolling down a hill. It consulted a sort of tablet clutched in one enormous clawed paw. "Team ... 4928, is it? Getting a bit hungry, are we?"

"We're citizens of Earth and we'd like a chance to call our embassy," Ianto said quickly. He could feel Owen being annoyed and pitying at him all at once, and thought the strongest possible fuck-off vibes back at him.

The crocolorry made a grating sound that was probably laughter. "Embassy. Good one." He tucked away the tablet into a belt pouch, and from the same utility belt drew a short thick metal wand. It looked small in his hand, but was almost three feet long. He slapped it into the palm of his other hand, and a chill ran through Ianto. Shock prod or baton — wielded by an arm that size, that thing could break someone's skull. "Come with me, 4928. It's showtime."

Ianto shared a look of mutual alarm with Owen, but it wasn't as if staying in the small, reeking cell was a good option. At least out of it, they'd have some chance of escape. They trooped out into a featureless, utilitarian corridor lined with metal doors, each bearing similar-yet-different markings that appeared to be some kind of alien script. When their door slid shut, Ianto glimpsed similar markings on their door. Numbers, maybe?

"Go go, hop to it, the audience will be getting restless," the crocolorry said. He smacked the baton into his palm again with another meaty thunk.

Okay, that _really_ didn't sound good. "Audience for what?" Ianto asked.

The crocolorry shoved the baton into the small of Owen's back. There was a sharp pop and Ianto jerked away, but there was no particular sensation from Owen beyond a sort of tingling. Well, that answered the question about whether it was a shock stick or not.

"Ooh, do it again," Owen said, flashing him a toothy smile. "Let's get this party started."

"You're an odd one, you are," the crocolorry murmured, and swung the baton toward Ianto, who hastily backed away.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Going, going."

They were herded down the corridor at what was for them a brisk trot bordering on a jog, but was a reasonable walking pace for the crocolorry. It opened the door at the end of the corridor with a wave of its hand, revealing a glint of metal embedded in the palm. Ianto noticed Owen was watching closely, cataloging the tech with his eyes.

"So is there food where we're going, I hope?" Ianto asked, by way of a distraction.

"That's up to you, isn't it?" the crocolorry said.

The door slid open on a small chamber that was obviously a lift of sorts. There was no sense of movement, but the door slid open on somewhere very different. A wave of noise hit them — cheering, clapping, and booing. Audience noises. There was a wall blocking their view, however.

 _Alien reality TV,_ Ianto thought. _Game shows? Let's just hope it's more like Jeopardy than Survivor._

They went around the wall and came out into a space bigger than an aircraft hangar. The noise hit them like a physical wall of sound.

They were on a balcony about halfway up what was clearly a large sport stadium. It was built just like a stadium or auditorium on Earth, except the spectators were standing — behind Plexiglass-like barriers — rather than sitting in seats. Possibly that was because it would have been impossible for one type of seat to encompass all the body plans on display. There were a staggering array of different aliens in the audience, ranging from vaguely human-like to madness-inducing weirdness. They surged behind the barriers, beating on barriers and walls with fists and hooves and tentacles, roaring and cheering and spilling their drinks.

Ianto found that he and Owen had instinctively drawn together until their shoulders bumped. It was some kind of atavistic instinct, he thought dazedly, that made you want to cling to your own kind for safety and comfort.

 _And all of this is on a SHIP?_ He couldn't even imagine how huge it must be.

"Oh, bloody hell," Owen muttered, audible through the noise only because he was so close. While Ianto stared around at the crowd and the bewildering variety of aliens — everywhere he looked, there was something new and bizarre — Owen was looking down to the arena floor.

It wasn't a sport match. At least, not precisely. There were two small figures down there, one built along the lines of a centaur, the other tall and slender and violet-skinned. They were fighting. From here it looked like they were using staves, Robin Hood style.

"We're sodding gladiators," Owen said. "Fuck this entire day and Jack Harkness too."

The crocolorry consulted its tablet again. "You're new, then," it said, its rocks-rolling-down-a-hill voice pitched to carry over the crowd noise. "You fight, you eat. Them are the rules. You pick which of you fights."

"What? No!" Ianto said.

"We're not doing it," Owen said at the same time.

The crocolorry shrugged, a roll of its massive shoulders. "Then we hurt one of you 'til the other one's ready to fight."

"Me, do me then," Owen said with an eye on the shock stick.

"Don't be a bloody idiot," Ianto snapped, cold to the core. They would figure out almost immediately that electricity did nothing to him, and then they were going to start breaking things — which Owen couldn't heal. "Look, the fight — is it to the ..." He swallowed. "Death?"

"Nah," the crocolorry said. "Just 'til one of you yields." It glanced down into the arena as a fresh wave of yelling from the crowd rolled over them. "Ooh, good hit. Just about done down there."

"Right, so one of us goes in there and yields immediately," Owen murmured to Ianto, leaning close to be heard over the yelling. "Easy, right?"

"In case either of you was getting any ideas," the crocolorry said, smacking the baton into its palm again with relish, "fighters gotta fight. Fighters don't fight, we hurt the other one up here, 'til you fight."

"Yeah yeah, pain and torture, whatever," Owen said. "Look mate, let's just do their little fight, buy some time for — er. You know. I go down and fight a bit, you get fed, that's how it works, right?"

"You?" Ianto said.

Owen bristled, and a hot wave of anger crested in Ianto's mind. "I know you lot think I'm a fragile flower these days, but what part of 'can't feel pain' doesn't make sense to you?"

"So I'll wheel you out of here in a barrow, then, and we can tape you back together?"

" _Fuck off,_ Ianto."

"No, look, I'm going. It won't be that bad. I've been practicing hand-to-hand combat with Jack — shut —"

"Is that what you're calling it these days?"

"— _up,_ Owen — and I can hold my own down there, just, you know, put in the time they want, and buy _us_ some time for ... you know." He leaned closer, and said quietly, "It makes more sense for you to be up here, Owen. You're the doctor. And if they don't like how I'm fighting and decide to give you a few taps from that stick, you won't feel it."

Owen stared at him. Ianto held his gaze, feeling the turmoil under the surface, and how much of it was worry in addition to anger. It was, for the most part, only the anger that showed, and it made him wonder how much there was normally going on underneath the furious mask that Owen had chosen to put on to insulate himself from the world.

"Fuck!" Owen burst out. He turned away, started to kick a wall, and stopped himself with a visible exercise of willpower. "Fine. Go down there and get the shit kicked out of you, I don't care."

Ianto didn't point out that he manifestly _did_ care and they could both feel it.

"Come on, then," another crocolorry guard said, grabbing Ianto's arm in a grip that felt like it was going to bruise.

"Protect your core!" Owen yelled after Ianto. "Don't let them at your nose and jaw — forehead's much harder! Keep your thumb outside your fist when you punch!"

"I do know that last one!" Ianto shouted back, mustering up a surge of irritation that helped combat the terror and the awareness that Owen could feel his terror, just as he could feel Owen's concern.

Ianto's keeper took him down a long, winding ramp into the bowels of the stadium. The walls closed around them, shutting out some of the noise.

"Pretty good time here," the guard remarked. Ianto was being half urged forward and half dragged; his feet barely touched the ground, and most of his weight was being held up by the painful grip on his arm. "I place bet on you. That's a good time."

"Hooray," Ianto said.

"You new, yeah?"

"Yeah," he admitted. "So I fight until my opponent yields or I do, right?"

"Yeah," the guard said.

"Good, that doesn't sound so —"

"Then whoever win, they choose whether they kill the loser or not."

"I thought it wasn't to the death!" Ianto yelped, trying to dig in his feet. He might as well have tried to pick up a city bus with his bare hands.

"Crowd likes merciful winners," the guard said cheerfully. "Hardly ever anyone dies."

"Oh, well, good, I suppose —"

"Except by weapons accident, you know."

"Oh, okay —"

"Or when winner is not feeling merciful."

The sensation of Owen's worry was not only failing to fade as the distance between them grew, but abruptly intensified, making Ianto realize that Owen had just felt his burst of panic. He tried to flatten it out. It wasn't like panicking was going to help the situation anyway.

_What does the crowd think of combatants who scream and run away and try to do everything they can to avoid their opponent, I wonder ..._

The crowd noise was barely audible as they reached the bottom of the ramp and another large door, but Ianto still thought he could feel it, the compressed noise of all those people (alien people, but still people) throbbing in his chest.

 _How can they be okay with this?_ he thought plaintively, but then he thought about some of the blood sport that humans had engaged in, over the centuries. Yeah, it wasn't just an alien thing.

The guard opened the door at the bottom of the ramp, and this time, what hit Ianto were the moans of the injured. In a normal stadium, this would be the locker room or backstage area. Here, it was large and mostly empty. A work crew was hosing out one corner, and Ianto saw the tall, violet-skinned humanoid he had seen fighting, or one of its species, being propped up by someone short and squat and green. There was purple blood everywhere.

"You up!" the guard declared, and before Ianto could decide whether it would be best to start running _now_ or whether he should wait until he was in the arena, a staff was shoved into his hands and he was half-pushed, half-flung out a large set of double doors into blood-stained sand.

The crowd's yelling broke over him. Ianto staggered to his feet, clutching the staff. Halfway across the arena, the centaur stood watching him. She was almost as massive and burly in her human half as her centaur half, and covered in scars. She stood with the end of her staff propped in the sand, the bloody flanks of her horse-half heaving as she took deep breaths.

"Look, I don't want to fight you," Ianto called desperately, shouting to be heard over the crowd noise. Up above, an announcer was rattling off the centaur's various wins.

".... and bringing the challenge to contestant 3174, we have 4928, a small and flabby biped from an inconsequential planet in the second spiral arm —"

"Thanks," Ianto muttered. His sweaty grip slipped on the staff.

"Betting will close in four dagrits!" the announcer's voice roared. "Three ... two ... one. Betting is now closed. Begin!"

Owen's worry spiked to an extent that made it almost impossible for Ianto to think of anything else. "Thanks a lot, Owen!" he yelled out loud, as the centaur kicked out with her rear hooves and launched herself into motion, galloping toward him.

_Fuck. I am going to die._

She hadn't killed her last opponent, he thought, watching her pound toward him. Which meant losing to her was probably ... not _safe,_ exactly, but perhaps his best option. Especially since there was no way he could possibly beat her.

He just had to fight enough to make it look good enough that they didn't break anything on Owen up there, then let her win. 

She veered off to the side before she reached him, coming in at an angle, and swung her staff toward him. As she did, there was a metallic _ching!_ sound and two feet of gleaming steel, dripping with purple liquid, slid out of the end of the staff.

"Gyaaaaah!" Ianto yelled, or some equally heroic noise, as he threw himself to the sand, losing his grip on the staff.

Falling at least was something he'd got pretty good at, since Jack had been giving him one-on-one combat lessons — _not_ a euphemism, fuck you very much, Owen. (Well, not usually.) He rolled and came up to his feet, panting, with the roar of the crowd pressing on his ears, and sand in every crevice of his suit. A three-piece suit and tie was absolutely terrible combat attire, he was beginning to realize. He should have left some of it back in the cell.

The centaur cornered with a rooster tail of sand spraying from under her hooves. Ianto lunged for his dropped staff as she turned and started galloping back toward him. The blade was still deployed from her staff; did he have one of those, and if so, how did he get it out? But he really didn't want to hurt her. Could he trip her with the staff, maybe?

As she galloped, she swung the staff like a jousting lance to rest at her side. The blade was turned toward the rear, with the blunt end pointing forward. Perhaps she'd opted to go for non-lethal methods once she realized she was up against an unskilled opponent, he thought hopefully.

He didn't really _want_ to take a blow from the staff, but it might not be the worst thing if he went down quickly. But would it satisfy their keepers if he went down at the first blow? _Better make up your mind quickly ..._

She was almost on him. He ducked, swiping his staff at her hooves. She jumped easily, clearing it, but her aim with the staff was thrown off, and Ianto caught a glancing blow in the shoulder.

— and pain exploded like a lightning bolt, seizing up all his muscles. He dropped the staff and collapsed twitching in the sand.

Great, he thought as he managed to pull his dazed thoughts back together. One end was a spear, the other end was a shock baton.

Owen, in his head, was one blazing wall of _panicworrypanicRAGE._

Ianto tried to send back that he was basically fine; not that he _felt_ fine, he still couldn't move his arm and might have dislocated or even broken his shoulder — but as the twitching effects of the shock wore off, he thought he might have got off pretty easy. He looked up as the centaur came into his field of view, looming above him and looking down her staff at him.

"I yield," he croaked.

"Don't be stupid," she snarled. "You can still fight, can't you? What kind of fool are you?"

The crowd were booing now. The centaur grimaced.

"I don't want to fight you," Ianto gasped out.

"What does it matter what either of us want? We have to give them a show. If you won't fight, I'll stomp you to rags under my hooves. That's the kind of show they enjoy."

She reared up, and suddenly Ianto had a view of her horse-body underside, iron shoes on her hooves, and the mix of blood and sand crusting both front hooves.

He cursed and rolled wildly out of the way as she crashed back to the sand where he'd just been, with all her body weight behind it. He would have been pulverized. She wasn't messing around.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Ianto muttered. He scrabbled wildly away from her. Her blade whipped over his head, almost clipping his hair. She hadn't been trying to hit him that time. The crowd were cheering wildly.

"Let me give you a piece of advice, since you're new," the centaur said. She kept coming after him, swinging the staff, never giving him a chance to get up. All he could do was scrabble along crab-style. The crowd, from the noise, was eating it up. "There are three things this lot likes, more or less in this order: excitement, blood, and satisfaction. The audience hates cowards —" The staff-blade swept past his head again, and this time there was a sting of pain on his forehead, and he felt a hot trickle of blood. "So they find it very satisfying to see a coward toyed with, and eventually killed. The happier I make them, the more they make on bets, and the better they treat me, see? I get perks. Including matching me with opponents who don't pose a threat to me, like you. If you want to win an honorable defeat, you have to _earn_ — GAH!"

In the middle of her monologuing, Ianto dropped flat on his back, so that she trotted half over him before reflex kicked in and she managed to reverse direction. Meanwhile, he grabbed hold of her tail and yanked as hard as he could.

He had, at least, found something she wasn't expecting. She yelled in surprise and pain, and her hindquarters sagged dangerously toward his face. Ianto rolled to the side, suddenly realizing that having a ton of horse sit on him wouldn't do him any favors either.

"Like that, you mean?" he panted, scrambling to his feet in the grip of a rush of delight and satisfaction that was mostly from Owen.

"You little fucker, that _hurt,"_ she snarled, and she spun around and kicked him with her rear hooves.

He had no chance to dodge. All he could do was throw his arms up to try to shield his torso, mindful of Owen's protect-your-core advice. Her hooves crashed into him with stunning full-body pain, and he was thrown into the air, only for a whole new world of hurt to kick in when he hit the sand. 

He couldn't get a breath. He'd felt things _give_ when her hooves hit him, but as he tumbled, there was so much pain that he couldn't even tell where it was coming from. He fetched up in a tangled heap, curled in on himself in agony. His mouth was full of sand, and when he finally managed to wheeze in a breath, he also sucked in some sand and then doubled up in agonized coughing.

Something hard prodded painfully at him. He tried to roll away, and pain knifed through his side. God, did he have broken ribs? A punctured lung? He still couldn't get enough air.

The prodding came again, and he was rolled over onto his back — by her hoof, he realized dazedly as he squinted up at her, having to blink rapidly to clear his vision of the blood running into his eyes. She planted a hoof on his chest and struck a dramatic pose, spun the staff over her head and reversed it so the blade was pointed at his throat. The crowd was a single roaring entity.

"Now," she said, teeth bared in a vicious grin, "you may yield, if you like."

For a horrible instant he couldn't get enough breath to speak. His vision had started to gray out around the edges. In the back of his mind, Owen's emotions were going off the charts.

"Or perhaps I'll just kill you."

He managed to suck in a whooping breath that he didn't cough back out immediately. "Yield," he gasped. It rasped out of a sore throat; he'd not only inhaled some sand but, from the feel of things, he'd also swallowed some. "I ... I yield. Please. Don't kill me."

She stared for a long moment down the staff, then spat into the sand and lifted her hoof off his chest and did a quick step back. She held the staff above her head, and the crowd went wild.

Ianto lay coughing and panting in the sand until a couple of guards came to drag him out. He couldn't even get his feet under him.

* * *

He was only vaguely aware of being half-dragged, half-carried back to the cell; in fact he wasn't sure where they were taking him, and couldn't manage either the breath or the mental processing cycles to ask (especially with Owen panicking in the back of his mind, thus doing away with what little ability to think he currently possessed).

He knew he was back in the cell by the stink. They dumped him in a heap on the floor, and after lying still for a moment, slowly he managed to get himself sitting up, leaning against the wall, so at least he didn't have his face pressed into the horrid floor. He huddled like that, curled up in a world of pain, and concentrated first of all on breathing. 

He had got as far as slowly managing to uncurl a little bit in order to try to figure out where he was hurt worst when suddenly the door opened and he heard the unexpectedly welcome sound of Owen shouting at someone.

"— hands _off,_ you great ape; what the fuck did you lunatics do with him?" Although his eyes were still shut, Ianto felt the moment when Owen saw him, a sudden rush of mingled relief and fury. "Can we get some medical supplies in here, you sodding arsewipe?" Owen shouted, and then his hands were on Ianto, and even though he was in some sense expecting it, Ianto flinched away.

"Whoa there mate, don't panic, just stay still for a minute, yeah?" Owen's hands were cold as always, and trembled slightly, which was something he'd never felt before, any of the times Owen had patched them up. And then he remembered that Owen was feeling everything he was feeling, possibly with even more intensity due to the sensory deprivation: Owen was shivering with Ianto's pain.

"Sorry," he gasped out, as Owen eased him down on the hard, cold floor.

"For what?" Owen asked, sounding distracted. "No, lie flat, lie flat. You could have neck or back injuries. Jesus, when she kicked you, you looked like a rag doll."

"Thanks," Ianto panted. "Helping a lot there."

But it did actually, or at least, what helped was having someone take charge, someone who was an expert, someone who knew what to do. He lay and focused on steadying his breathing and getting himself under control for both their sakes, while Owen undid Ianto's tie and opened his shirt. Everything still hurt, but it was starting to coalesce into specific loci of pain: his chest and side, his shoulder, his head, his left forearm.

"You know, this is actually very useful from a doctor's perspective," Owen murmured, while his cold hands moved briskly over Ianto's torso, pressing and prodding. "Normally I have to ask, 'Does this hurt?' Whereas with you —" He hit something in Ianto's side that gave, with a blinding bolt of pain, and his voice faltered and cracked. "Anyway," he said, recovering, with a slight hitch, "it's a diagnostic tool I wouldn't mind having. Perhaps muted a bit, though ..."

"Do I have broken ribs?" Ianto asked breathlessly.

"Broken or cracked. It's hard to tell without X-rays. You'll need to be very careful with those. But mainly, you have a lot of world-class bruising. Good job protecting your sternum, by the way. A sharp blow to the chest like that can stop your heart."

"Thanks, I needed to know that."

But he was calming down a lot, and part of that was because he was distracted by what was happening with Owen's emotions as Owen focused on examining him: they almost completely went away. The towering _worrypanicrage_ that Ianto had felt when Owen first touched him had narrowed down to a single-minded pinpoint. When Owen focused on a patient, it was literally all he was thinking about. It was the first time since Ianto woke up in the cell that Owen hadn't felt to him like a pot of water simmering just below the boil, all those raging emotions (invariably including anger as a component) coalescing into a laser-pointed focus that was directed entirely at diagnosing Ianto.

"— pain in your chest at all?"

"I ... uh ..." He had to run the question back in his head to answer it. "Not really, I think it's mostly my shoulder and side." It felt like he was being knifed in the side every time he took a breath, but Owen would certainly be able to feel that.

"That's what it felt like to me, but I wanted to double-check what it's like on your end; it's hard to sort out all of this. What about your head? Any confusion, loss of memory, trouble thinking? More so than usual, I mean," Owen added with a quick flash of a strained grin.

"Not really." That made him aware of the tickle of blood on his forehead. He started to reach up, then lowered his arm with a gasp that was echoed by a soft, pained sound from Owen. "Sorry."

"Enough with the bleedin' apologies," Owen murmured, pulling Ianto's shirt away from his shoulder.

"Next time we're both in agony I'll unapologetically let you suffer, then." His breath hissed through his teeth as Owen touched some other part of his shoulder that hurt; he felt Owen flinch too.

"Is this a sodding electrical burn?"

"There's an electric end to those staves," Ianto gasped out; Owen was doing something to his shoulder. "She got me there. Is it broken?"

"Don't think so, but you'll sure be turning colors by morning. Or whatever passes for morning around here," Owen added with a glance at the unchanging light in the ceiling.

The door hissed open again. "Food," declared the rumbling voice of one of the guards. "And a med kit. Crowd liked you; you get perks."

The door slammed again. Ianto turned his head to see Owen get up and retrieve the tray that had been left just inside the door.

"Food, huh," Owen murmured. "Well, that'll be useful for you." His hand lingered wistfully over it, just briefly; Ianto felt the surge of longing, more than hunger. "Looks like they only gave us one portion, which I guess doesn't matter all that much given the givens, but they don't seem to feed their gladiators overly much."

"You don't fight, you don't eat," Ianto said under his breath.

"Fun types, can't wait to see Jack blow up this entire sorry ship. And let's see what they gave us for medical supplies ... looks like some basic kit, bandages, guess this is antiseptic from the smell? No painkillers, none I can find anyway. Bastards."

Owen set the tray down beside Ianto a little more heavily than necessary.

Owen's anger was like an itch under Ianto's skin that he couldn't scratch. He'd spent a lifetime learning to channel and redirect his own anger, showing what he wanted people to see, keeping himself locked down. Having all of Owen's messy, uncontrolled emotions seething in his head was intensely uncomfortable, a weird mix of frustrating and embarrassing.

"Sorry mate, get this over as quick as I can," Owen said, clearly misunderstanding the reason for whatever he was getting from Ianto's end.

Something cold and stinging touched Ianto's shoulder. He gasped.

"Relax," Owen said, though he plainly wasn't taking his own advice; in addition to the tense mix of various upset emotions that Ianto could feel from him, his hands were jerky and his entire body felt rigid. "This is some sort of burn lotion, I think. Smells like it. And there's what I think is something like Betadine. I'll get your forehead after this."

Ianto had almost forgot about the forehead. After some initial stinging, the pain in his shoulder settled into a dull, numbish sort of throbbing, while Owen went over to the sink and soaked a square of fabric from the box of medical supplies. 

"Ready?" Owen said, crouching beside him. Ianto nodded and tried to relax as Owen started cleaning up his face, wiping away the blood and sand crusted around his eyes.

Owen's grip was steady, but small tremors ran through his hands. Ianto wondered what this was feeling like on his end. Sharing pain had been one thing, but this was ... intimate, in its way, the scrape of grit on skin, the soft pressure of the wet fabric. And right now Owen was, Ianto suspected, just about the most touch-starved that a human being could possibly get. The emotions leaking through from Owen's end suggested that he was really enjoying this and trying not to.

"Going to stitch that up now, all right? Looks like they gave us supplies for that, at least. Don't want your pet fighters breaking open a gut wound in the middle of a fight, I reckon."

The first prick of a needle into Ianto's skin made both of them jump. 

"Right," Owen said under his breath. He held still for a moment, cold fingertips pressed to Ianto's forehead. "That's going to make this harder. Let's try some of that lotion here too. We don't have a lot of it, but it seems to be cutting the pain in your shoulder."

It was sharply cold on Ianto's skin, even more so than the cool chill of Owen's fingers. Owen jerked a little at the wet-cold sensation, and Ianto felt another of those vicarious surges of guilty pleasure-pain.

"We're both going to have some weird kinks when all this is done," he said, trying to cut the tension. Owen stilled abruptly, then gave a little laugh.

"Right, you can feel ... all of that. It's not you, mate. It's just a lot."

"I know it is." He wasn't sure what to say. They didn't really _talk,_ the two of them. Not about things like that.

The lotion was doing its thing on his forehead now, tingling into cold numbness. He could still feel the needle when it went in, pain combined with a deeply unnerving tugging sensation, but it wasn't as acute as earlier. Owen's hands remained steady, and Ianto could feel him skirting around the edges of the doctor hyperfocus state he'd had earlier, but he couldn't seem to slip into it this time; his emotions were all over the place. The awareness of the needle sliding into Ianto's skin was unpleasant for both of them, but in Owen's case it was mingled with uneasy enjoyment.

"Is that going to leave a scar?" Ianto asked, going crosseyed trying to look up at what Owen was doing to his forehead.

Owen actually laughed, the bastard. "Trust you to have concerns about _that."_

"It's a reasonable concern!"

"It's right up at the hairline, mate. You might end up with a lumpy bit, but it'll be covered by your hair. Anyway, Harkness'll probably like it. He seems the sort who appreciates a good scar." He tied off the suture and began cleaning the tools with a fabric square tipped in something sharp-smelling. "That's about all I can do for you," he said, not looking at Ianto. "At least I don't need to ask how you're feeling."

"Guess not." Ianto started to gather himself to sit up, then hesitated. "Okay to move now?"

"Not like we can do anything if not," Owen said, not very reassuringly. "For what it's worth, I don't think your back is messed up. Just be careful and don't do anything that hurts."

"What, you mean all of it?" he said, and Owen laughed.

He wasn't quite getting used to the pain, one couldn't really, but at least on the whole, it was a dull throbbing unless he moved too fast, or twisted, or moved his arm wrong. Owen was right, he was a mass of bruises, but the only thing that really hurt acutely was his side, and that was only when he breathed deeply or forgot not to bend the wrong way. He washed his hands at the sink, and poked lightly at the nobbly stitches under the edge of his hair.

"Don't do that," Owen said without looking around. "Get an infection in there, you won't like it."

Ianto jerked his hand down. He wished there was a mirror here so he could see what he actually looked like, but was also kind of glad there wasn't. He splashed a little water on his face, and rebuttoned his shirt. He was cold, and starting to shiver a little in the post-pain, post-adrenaline crash.

"Sit down and eat something," Owen said. "Doctor's orders. Food's actually kind of decent-looking."

Ianto sat down carefully. He was getting a little better at moving without hurting himself. He reached for the tray and pulled it toward him to see what passed for food around here.

It wasn't much, but he'd expected cold gruel and was surprised to find that it was warm, and even not entirely unfamiliar. There was a bowl of thick stew and a hunk of what was clearly bread, or some sort of bread substitute. It was green, but peering at it closely, Ianto thought that was probably its natural color and not mold.

Their captors hadn't provided them any utensils to eat with, but it wasn't that hard to work around. He picked up the bowl and sipped from it. He discovered in the process that he'd bitten the inside of his cheek at some point in the arena, probably when he hit the ground after being kicked. It had been submerged in all the other pain until the warm stew stung it.

But the stew really wasn't bad. Salty and hearty, the sort of thing you might want after a long hard day of beating the stuffing out of your fellow gladiators.

Owen stilled in his methodical cleaning and arranging of the medical kit. His pleasure was tempered with hints of guilt.

"You felt me take a piss earlier," Ianto said, lowering the bowl. "Just have fun with this one."

Owen rolled his eyes, but he laid the tools aside and leaned a shoulder against the wall, watching as well as feeling. It ... probably wasn't the weirdest thing they'd ever done at Torchwood, come to think of it. Ianto ate slowly, trying to savor it, letting Owen experience as much of it as he could: the flavor, the heat, the spreading contentment despite all his aches as his body's hunger was satisfied.

Owen had his eyes half closed, his cheek pressed against the wall. "You know," he said slowly, "I think that's what I miss most, about all of it? It's not just having it, it's ... being _sated._ Content. You don't know how good that feeling is until you don't have it anymore."

Ianto had no idea what to say to that. He tore off and ate a piece of the green bread. It had a pleasant, nutty flavor. 

"Might ought to save some of that," Owen said. "No telling when they'll decide to feed us next."

"Yeah, that's a point." He was about done anyway, and starting to shiver slightly again. He wrapped the bread in his slightly sandy pocket square and put it in his jacket pocket. 

Owen leaned forward and went back to sorting and putting away the medical stuff. "You probably ought to get some sleep, if you can." His shoulder was to Ianto, but the emotions underneath were a mess.

There was some sense to that. Ianto looked at the dirty floor, and then, with a grimace, began to carefully peel off his jacket. He was cold already, didn't really want to get colder, but he also didn't want to have his face on _that._

"Oi, oi, wait, wait." Owen twisted around and began peeling out of his jacket, and then his pullover, leaving him in a gaudy band T-shirt. "It's for looks, isn't it?" he said when Ianto stared blankly at the wadded-up ball of clothing Owen thrust in his general direction. "I don't need to keep warm. Only reason I wear anything at all is because nobody wants to see a dead guy running around naked." He grinned leeringly. "I'd offer the trousers, underwear too if you want it ..."

Ianto rolled his eyes, as he knew he was meant to, and took it. "Thanks," he said sincerely.

He rolled up the shirt into a ball and tucked it under his head, with the jacket over the top of him. The cold, hard metal floor was miserable for lying on, especially as sore as he was, but having a pillow, of sorts, made it marginally less unpleasant. Neither the jacket nor shirt were warm, as he found himself subconsciously expecting from recently-worn clothing, even though he knew Owen had no body heat. There was a light smell of cologne and detergent, but nothing else, no soap or body smell. And yet, there was something peculiarly comforting about burying his face in it.

"What are you going to do while I sleep?" he asked, cracking an eye open.

"Working on escape plans might be a good bet," Owen said. "We've seen the place now. We have more to work with than just this metal rubbish tip here. Got to be some options."

"Jack and the team are coming for us."

"I know they are," Owen said, with the same underlying mix of skepticism and hope that Ianto had felt from him before, now tilted more strongly toward the skeptical side. "But them helps those what helps themselves, don't they? As my gran used to say."

"Gran was a bit off, was she?"

"Oi! That's my gran you're talkin' about."

But the underlying emotions were warmer, softer than he was used to associating with Owen.

* * *

He didn't expect to actually sleep, and realized that he had only when he woke, aching and stiff, curled on his side on the metal floor underneath Owen's jacket. He started to sit up and immediately found out why _that_ was a terrible idea.

Across the room, there was a loud _clang!_ that turned out to be Owen dropping the soup bowl into the sink.

When he could speak again, Owen said, "Stiffened up a bit, did you."

"Christ," Ianto groaned. His entire body was made up of board-stiff muscles and hot, aching bruises. He didn't know if he'd ever been in this much pain in his life. Even after being beaten to within an inch of his life by village cannibals, he'd still had hot baths and painkillers — pretty good painkillers, too, because Owen had broken out the heavy stuff.

"Try stretching a little at a time first," Owen suggested. He wet something in the sink and came over with it. "You know, since we do have some spare bandaging material, we might be able to use wet cloths in lieu of icing the worst areas. I didn't think of it last night, but it might still help. Heat would be better right now, but that, we haven't got."

Cold was the last thing Ianto wanted; he was chilled enough already. The temperature in their cell was just slightly below comfortable, not that noticeable most of the time, but after spending a night (or what passed for a night) on the cold floor, right now he was miserably chilly and he could tell it was contributing to locking up his sore muscles.

Still, he let Owen apply cold cloths to some of the sorer areas. It gave Owen something to do; Ianto could feel him slipping into his hyperfocused doctor mode again.

Ianto wished he had something similar. Back at the Hub, he had sublimated his distress and fear and all the rest of it into the comforting routine of daily activities. Filing things, cleaning up ... it was probably a measure of how much the current situation was throwing him off that he hadn't even thought of doing the dishes before crashing.

Well, why not? he thought. Once he was able to unkink himself enough to stand up, he folded Owen's borrowed clothes in a neat stack by the wall, and then wet down some of the cloths they'd been using for ice packs, and started scrubbing.

Owen turned around from contemplating the door area. "Are you ... _cleaning the cell?"_

"It makes me feel better," Ianto said obstinately. Actually, at the moment it was making him feel worse due to aggravating his bruises and headache, but he wasn't about to admit it.

"You're so bloody weird sometimes."

The soup bowl made a decent vessel for sluicing water across the floor, letting it drain into the toilet hole. "They haven't been back yet?" Ianto asked as he filled it at the sink.

"Nope. Not a sign."

"How are the escape plans coming?" The movement was finally starting to help a little, or at least it was warming him up. His muscles hadn't yet worked beyond the agonizingly-stiff stage.

"Well, somehow I don't think the old 'help, my cellmate is dying' trick is going to work on people who don't especially care if we die. And we don't have much in the way of assets. Unhelpful bastards didn't even have the decency to give us a scalpel in the medical kit," Owen complained. "Sharpest thing we have is the needle I stitched you up with last night. Though maybe I could break the antiseptic bottle and use the shards for a weapon."

"Do you really think either of us could take one of those bruisers in a fight?" Ianto asked. It was surprising how much it was improving his mood to get some of the layered-on filth off the floor. "I'm calling them crocolorries, by the way."

"Croc— you know, sometimes I almost forget why it's a bad idea to let you name anything ever."

Ianto snorted. "If you have a better idea, speak up."

He leaned against the wall and rubbed his temples. The exercise was working out some of the stiffness, but a grinding headache had dug in behind his eyes. 

"You all right?" Owen said.

"Yeah. Just ... might've hit my head harder than I thought, yesterday." Or whatever day it had been. He had a sudden worrying image of bleeding out from a brain aneurysm. "I, er ... I don't suppose you can diagnose a bleed on the brain before I drop dead from it."

"Not with the tools I have here," Owen said unreassuringly, but followed it up immediately with, "Don't have to, anyway. I have good news for you, mate. That's a caffeine headache."

"Really?" It felt like a screw was twisting behind his eyes. His entire head pulsed in time with his heartbeat. "That's good news, is it."

"Well, you're not dying."

"I have been missing coffee," Ianto said wistfully. "I don't suppose there's anything that can be done."

"Not without paracetamol or ibuprofen. Which I don't have because _no one will fucking give me any!"_ Owen yelled up at the general ceiling region.

"Could you please not shout."

"Yeah. Sorry."

Ianto took a deep breath and went to wet a cloth in the sink for more scrubbing. It was only a headache. He'd had worse.

He was aware of Owen approaching him because there was no way not to be; it wasn't like they could sneak up on each other right now. Still, he jerked a little when Owen spoke up right behind him.

"There's something I can try," Owen said. "I mean, what have you got to lose?"

Ianto turned around and leaned against the sink. "I'm attached to my head, Owen. Don't do anything to damage it." He pulled back when Owen reached for his face. "What are you doing?"

"Pressure points," Owen said. "There are headache pressure points in the forehead."

"Pressure points? That doesn't sound like your kind of thing. Not scientific enough."

"We are on a spaceship," Owen said, "sharing a telepathic link, being forced to fight in an arena while hoping our immortal boss from the future comes to rescue us, and also, I'm dead."

"Yes, yes, point taken." He forced himself to stand still, but kept his eyes open, as Owen's cold fingertips pressed into his forehead just above the inside corners of his eyes, where his brows dipped toward his nose. It was a strange feeling, not least because he wasn't used to being as physically close to Owen as he had been for the last couple of days.

Owen was, in general, a handsy person, and Ianto was very much not. In the beginning he had never really noticed that Owen was somewhat more physically reserved around him, compared to the rest of their teammates, until that had changed at some point, possibly while Jack was gone. Still, it was minor — a brush of a hand on his shoulder, a light touch in the middle of his back to redirect him in the field. And of course there was the brisk doctor's touch when Owen stitched any of them up after a field op gone bad. Professional touch, firm but gentle.

This, like wiping the blood from his face yesterday, was something different. He stood very still as Owen's thumbs dug in, almost firm enough to hurt, but not quite. Owen's face, near his own, was steady with concentration: that medical hyperfocus again.

But it was flavored with something else this time, beyond the general awareness of Ianto's physicality, the pressure of Owen's thumbs in Ianto's forehead strangely doubled. There was something else there, a wistful emotional ache, a memory of grief.

"I used to do this for Katie," Owen said, his voice soft and distant, almost like an echo. "When her headaches got bad. It didn't often help. But sometimes it did. Enough to be worth trying."

"Katie ... your fiancée." They had never talked about it, not even once. But Ianto had read Owen's file; he'd read all their files.

Grief, Owen's grief, slammed into him with the force of a truck. Owen's hands flinched, and he pulled away. "Not really doing much," he muttered. "I can tell that, don't have to say anything."

"Owen ..."

Ianto wanted to bring up Lisa, wanted to say _I understand,_ but he didn't think that would go well, considering how the team felt about Lisa. It must be bleeding through anyway, emotionally speaking, because Owen gave him a sharp look, emotional walls slamming down.

"You want to try to get some escape plans together, or stroll down memory lane?" Owen said.

Ianto decided to take it for what it was, dismissal and distraction and olive branch all rolled into one. He took a slow breath through the headache, and let it out. "Do you have any ideas?"

* * *

By the time the guards finally showed up, perhaps a couple of hours later by Ianto's reckoning, they'd got no closer to coming up with a workable plan. They had progressed to tossing back and forth the most ridiculous suggestions they could think of, everything from having Owen stand on Ianto's shoulders in a stolen trench coat to trying to seduce the guards. ("You first, mate.")

On the bright side, the cell was looking much cleaner, almost livable .... aside from being a metal cell on a spaceship full of sadists with no amenities other than a pit toilet, obviously.

The door slid open; there was a guard with a tablet and the bored look of overworked civil servants everywhere. "Team 4928. Ready for another match?"

"No, he's bloody well not ready," Owen snapped, scrambling to his feet. "He had the living shit kicked out of him yesterday."

The guard glanced at his tablet. "You're skipping your match day, then?"

"What does it mean if we do?" Ianto asked.

"You don't get fed."

"Fuck," Owen muttered. He glanced sideways at Ianto. "Listen, I can take this one."

"What? No!" Ianto retorted. "No. We'll ... we'll skip it today."

Caffeine headache aside — and God, he missed coffee — he wasn't _that_ hungry. He still had the bread from yesterday. And every day they held out was one more day for Jack and the others to find them. There was a very real possibility, he thought, that if he went into the arena in this sort of shape, he was going to die. Jack _was_ coming, and they could hold out better in the cell than out there in the ring, even without food.

"Sod off, Ianto, I can fight," Owen growled.

"There's no need to. Let's just take a day off, okay?"

"Your choice," the guard said, making a tick on the tablet.

"No! Get back here!" Owen flung himself forward, slapped his hand against the door just as it closed, and then spun on Ianto. His anger pressed against the inside of Ianto's skull. "What's wrong with you? Do you _like_ starving?"

"I'm not going to starve to death in one day."

"There's no fucking _need_ for it! I'm not a child or a fucking glass bauble, Ianto! Don't you _dare_ make my decisions for me!"

Owen's emotional landscape was a seething, roiling thunderstorm of rage and emotional pain, hate and self-hatred. With all of that pounding on him, Ianto could barely think.

"Don't be daft, Owen! You saw what happened to me when she kicked me! What do you think will happen to you in there?"

He realized that he had taken perhaps the worst possible tack with Owen when the mental frenzy of rage escalated, which he hadn't thought was possible.

"I don't want your cocksucking _pity_ , you selfish fucking _prick!"_

Owen was hardly failing to telegraph his intentions, but Ianto was still so startled when Owen swung at him that he only managed to flinch away enough to avoid taking Owen's fist directly in the face. Instead it clipped the side of his head, and he reeled back while Owen staggered and clapped a hand to the side of his face.

"Yeah, you might as well be punching yourself, you towering idiot," Ianto half-shouted. Owen had got him on the orbital edge of the eye socket, and now it was throbbing like mad. Probably was going to bruise too. The only minimal comfort was that Owen was probably feeling it even more, because of the touch-deprivation thing. "What the hell, it's not _pity_ , you —"

"The fuck it isn't! Are you forgetting I can see inside your head right now?"

Owen swung again. At least this time Ianto saw him coming and moved to block — Jack's hand-to-hand lessons hadn't been in vain — but Owen swung his other fist in, the hand with the broken fingers, and sucker-punched Ianto low down on his bruised midsection. There was a singularly unpleasant burst of blinding pain combined with the horrid feeling of Owen's broken finger popping out of place. They both went down flat in separate huddles of pain.

Ianto uncurled first and crab-scuttled until his back slammed into the wall, as far away from Owen as he could get. His chest heaved and he managed not to retch through sheer stubbornness. After a few moments the walls stopped spinning. By that point Owen had also managed to uncurl and was glaring at him from the opposite side of the cell.

"Feel better?" Ianto asked, in as close to a normal tone as he could get.

Owen flashed two fingers at him. Ianto let his head flop back against the wall. Fine, _be_ that way.

Another moment or two passed, and his stomach stopped hurting quite so much, though the renewed throbbing in his eye socket was making his sinuses burn and prickle on that side.

Owen struggled to his feet, swayed a bit in the grip of Ianto's lingering disorientation, caught himself on the wall, and walked carefully over to their meager pile of supplies. He got one of their dwindling supply of spare bandages, and went over to the sink, where he soaked it down.

Ianto warily watched him approach. Owen crouched down next to him and held it out.

"Cold compress. Keep the bruising down."

Ianto hesitated and then took it. He pressed it to the throbbing side of his head. It did seem to help a little.

Owen sat down with his back against the wall and a few feet of space between them. 

After a moment or two, Ianto said, "Need any help with the hand?" He could tell from the feeling that Owen's little finger was still shifted out of place.

Owen glanced down at the bandaged hand lying limp and half-curled in his lap; his body language suggested that he hadn't even noticed. He hadn't rebandaged it since they'd been in the cell, and the bandages were stained with Ianto's blood and other filth. "It's fine," he said with something like a sigh, and leaned his head against the wall.

Given the fragile state of things between them right now, Ianto decided not to press it. He shifted the wet cloth to find a cooler corner to press against his eye socket.

"It's not pity," he said at last, and he was aware of Owen tensing up. "Whatever you're feeling from me. It's not."

There was a long tense silence. Owen's emotions felt like one giant bruise. Finally, he said, "Feels like it from where I'm sitting."

"There's no reason why both of us have to be hurt."

"Yeah, I think that's the way this is supposed to work, though," Owen said. "You trade off. One of you gets the shit kicked out of him, then the next time you need to eat, the other one takes the hit. Except in our case ..."

His self-loathing was so strong that it hurt. Ianto carefully tried to tamp down any softer emotion that might be construed as pity from Owen's direction.

"Since when are you the guy who plays the game by the rules, though?" he said.

Owen made a sound that might have been a choked-off little laugh. The breathtaking misery lightened somewhat.

"I know you think Jack's not coming," Ianto said.

"I never said —"

"You're thinking it, though," Ianto said, and Owen closed his mouth. Ianto let that hang in the air for a moment, and then he said, "Look, I'm not going to try to convince you. But I know it. I know it on the cellular level. So all we have to do is try not to get killed until he gets here." He felt the flare of contrariness that probably meant Owen was going to argue with him about it. "And yes, that _does_ apply to you too. We're total pants at this gladiator thing, so staying out of the arena is our best shot at holding on 'til they get here."

"Historically speaking, staking my life on other people hasn't gone so well for me."

That hurt, as it was meant to. 

"I know," Ianto said. "It hasn't really for me either, if it comes to that. First time for everything, though."

There was a long, almost-companionable silence. Owen got up, finally. "Get you a refresher on that," he said, holding out his hand.

Ianto gave him the wet cloth, now warmed to skin temperature. Owen re-soaked it at the sink, wrung it out, brought it back. While Ianto folded it carefully, Owen sat beside him again, not so far away this time, and began to tug on the ends of the soiled bandage on his hand, working it loose.

"Probably easier with two hands," Ianto said.

A silence: fragile, this time. Then Owen wordlessly held out his hand.

Ianto laid the wet cloth on his knee to free up his hands, and unwrapped it. Owen's broken finger was twisted almost entirely around. Ianto got himself firmly in hand, tamped down his revulsion in the same way he had done when he was tending Lisa's burns and the raw places where the metal bits merged with her ravaged flesh. He manipulated it carefully, straightening it out as gently as possible.

"Not gonna hurt me if you just pull it straight," Owen said softly.

"I know," Ianto said, and changed absolutely nothing he was doing. He gently eased it back into position, then leaned over, stretching against his bruises, to fetch a clean bandage from the box they'd been given.

"Oh come on, don't waste that," Owen said. "Speaking as a doctor here. You might need it later."

"Are you doing this, or am I?"

There was nothing for it but to use the same damp splint, but at least he got it neatly back into place, the clean bandage wrapping everything up. He tucked in the ends. A tidy job if he did say so.

"You used to do this for Lisa," Owen said, under his breath.

Although Ianto had been thinking of her, hearing her name spoken aloud still sent a sharp twinge through his chest. "Thought you couldn't read my mind."

"You were thinking loudly," Owen said, and Ianto mustered up a tight smile. "No, it's ... the emotions of it, you know? Tenderness."

The tenderness, if Owen wanted to call it that, hadn't all been for Lisa, but if Owen wanted to think that, it was fine with Ianto.

"I think after all that exercise I could go for dinner," Ianto said, and dug the slightly squashed piece of bread out of his pocket. Owen didn't bother smiling at the bad attempt at a joke, and he also didn't hide his eagerness. Ianto could feel him there, in the back of his head, leaning into the nutty taste of the bread and the relief, if only a little, of that slight easing of their shared hunger.

* * *

The worst part about this ... well, one of the worst parts ... was the utter timelessness of it. The steady light without reprieve, the complete inability to tell how long it had been or how long was yet to go. Hunger gnawed at Ianto, painful and unrelenting. He tried drinking water to ease the hunger pains. It helped a little, or at least he told himself that it did.

He told himself that people could go for weeks without food. Just a couple days of fasting was no big deal. People did that voluntarily for health and religious reasons. During the difficult weeks after Lisa's death, there had probably been times when he'd gone that long without eating for no reason except he simply hadn't wanted to.

"I'm thinking I might wait through two more food cycles," he said aloud.

Owen glanced up. He was sitting against the wall, using the needle from the alien first-aid kit to work on his cuff. So far Ianto had seen no sign that it was possible to open the things without special tools, but it gave Owen something to do.

"Knock yourself out," he said.

"If it's a day in between, that's three days. That's not going to kill me, and it gives Ja— the team that much more time to find us. Then ... maybe fight once, then wait through a couple more cycles."

The needle slipped and embedded itself a couple of inches deep in Owen's flesh. He made a small frustrated sound and pulled it out.

"Are you asking for my medical opinion as your doctor?" he asked, jaw set as he dug at the cuff again. "Or just wanting someone to validate your decisions? Helpful to know what kind of reaction you're looking for, here."

Owen's tightly wound irritation set Ianto's nerves on edge. "I'm talking it through with you because we're in this together."

"Oh, I get to have an opinion now?"

"For fuck's _sake,_ Owen."

"Mmm, profanity. You _do_ know how swearing works."

"Owen."

Owen huffed out a small not-quite-a-sigh and lowered both hands to rest in his lap.

"What do you want me to say?" he said, sounding weary. "Look, from where I'm sitting, feels like you're making executive decisions for the whole party on the basis of being the only alive person in it. Which, fair enough, knock yourself out. Just let's not pretend we're compromising here."

"Owen ..."

And then Ianto leaned back against the wall and just looked at Owen, feeling what Owen was feeling: the raw scraped-out misery and the ever-present anger and the cold numbness underlying everything, so constant that Ianto had almost stopped noticing it. And he thought back on the past few days. 

"You're right," he said. "I'm sorry."

Owen looked up at him, surprise written all over his face and stamped across the emotional overlay between them. He cupped a hand around his ear. "You're what now?"

_"Owen."_

"Sorry, I was just wondering if I could get that in writing. Maybe with the date too."

"You're such an astonishing prick," Ianto said.

Owen's half-amused, half-bitter smile quirked sideways. "I've been told."

"But you're also right. I can't tell you not to fight, if it's what you want to do. You have as much right to take that risk as I do. Just ..." He took a breath, feeling a strange unwinding of tension: the easing of a hurt between them that he hadn't even realized was there, even before their brawl — guilt and bitterness on Owen's end, and resentment on his own, because he had somehow made the decision at the very beginning that all the hurts would be his ... except it didn't have to be that way. "Just, let's _talk_ about it. Meet in the middle, if we can."

"Because we've always been brilliant at that," Owen said.

Ianto couldn't help smiling slightly. "Maybe this is good for us. Team building exercises."

"Get telepathically bonded to your teammate by alien slavers and forced into ring-fighting, learn new things, meet new people and punch them in the face, have emotional epiphanies about yourself."

"Blessing in disguise, really," Ianto said, and for a moment they just grinned at each other, with the emotional connection between them about as calm and harmonious as it had ever been. Ianto sobered first, turning serious. "All right then, if it's entirely up to you, what do you want to do?"

"When they come back next time, I take my turn in the ring," Owen said promptly. "It should be me anyway. Makes more sense. They can hit me all they want, and I won't feel it."

"But it'll still damage you. Permanently. And that'll hurt me."

Quick flash of startlement through the emotional connection, with a sardonic overlay quickly slapped on top of it. "Not as much as being down there yourself. Not as much as having your ribs broken, your muscles torn, your living flesh ripped apart by their weapons."

"Yes," Ianto said, and he projected quiet sincerity into the connection, as much of it as he could. "It would."

Owen looked at him, just looked at him. His emotions were all over the place. Then he said, "And watching you die by inches, starving yourself, is perfectly fine over on my end, right? No problems there."

Ianto let his head drop back against the wall, and closed his eyes briefly. Caught in his own trap. Fuck. "I mentioned you're a prick, right?"

"I know," Owen said, with the warm emotional glow of someone who knew they were winning an argument.

"Okay, how about this," Ianto said after a moment, when he'd wrestled his own emotions under control. "When they come back next time, I'll fight the next round. I think after having the extra time to rest, I'll be able to handle it. Since I don't care if I win, it's a matter of managing to convincingly throw the fight, and I've had some practice at it."

"Was that the part where you were screaming, or the part where she was kicking you across the—"

"Owen, stuff it."

Owen's lips started to twitch into a half-grin before flattening out.

"And that'll buy us another day," Ianto went on. "And then ... if we're still here for the next cycle, it'll be your turn."

"About bleedin' time."

"And by that point you'll have been able to watch, and feel, the matches I'm in, so you'll get a better shot at faking your way out of it without having too much of you broken. Because, Owen, they're not messing about down there. They're not going to accept it if you stab the staff at your opponent a few times and roll over. They're going to hurt you. And whatever they do to you, nothing can fix it."

"I know," Owen said. His lighter mood evaporated; he was deadly serious now. "But let me tell you, mate, speaking as a doctor — there is a _lot_ that can happen to you down there that nothing can fix, too. I'm more likely to break something that won't heal, you're right. But you're a lot more likely to bloody well _die."_

"You're okay with me going in next, though?"

"Of course I'm not! But," he added, capitulating somewhat, "someone's got to, and I'm aware you're giving in on the bloody stupid wait-three-days-and-starve plan, so fine, don't say I can't compromise, you can get curbstomped in the next cage match, and then I'm up. Yeah?"

"It's a plan."

* * *

By the time the guards finally showed up, food was all Ianto could think about. It _had_ to be more than an Earth day in between feedings. Or maybe it was just that a single plate of stew and bread didn't go far when you were sleeping on the floor and trying to heal a set of truly spectacular bruises.

Now that the swelling was starting to go down somewhat, Owen had declared Ianto's ribs "probably not broken, but don't go testing that theory." They had done some test sparring, very cautiously given both of their physical conditions, trying to work out a set of strategies to convincingly throw a fight without getting too badly hurt in the process.

"The fighter I was matched to in the last fight told me that the audience wants to be entertained," Ianto said. "Excitement, blood, and satisfaction, was what she said. I think if they get a show, that's all they care about, and it doesn't necessarily need to have spurting blood and severed limbs. They just want to have fun and don't much care how they get it, like all good sadistic sociopaths."

"So you think they won't be too fussed about whether you're actually getting tortured out there, as long as there's some showboating."

"With the obligatory dramatic collapse at the end, of course."

"And are you good at that?" Owen asked. "Dramatic collapsing and showboating?"

"Not to brag, but I had quite the reputation for acting when I was at school. I've played King Lear _and_ Macbeth."

"Yes, because Year Nine Shakespeare translates well to real life."

"And, not that I want to bring this up, but I kept Lisa in the basement for six months and none of you noticed anything."

"... right. That's a more convincing argument."

Still, when the moment finally came and they were led from the cell at shock-stick point, Ianto found an entire world of doubts cascading over him. He'd left his jacket and tie in the cell, mindful of how constricting they'd been in the last fight, and he felt strangely naked without them, cold in his shirtsleeves.

He still hurt in a hundred places from the last fight. He was going to be at a disadvantage having to protect his ribs. And he was weaker than he had expected. His knees wobbled; he hadn't expected to lose energy this fast. It _had_ to have been more than just a day.

_Two days really, or something like it, with one meal in that entire time. You don't need to be a doctor to know that you can't run forever on those rations._

Speaking of doctors ... Owen nudged him in the small of the back, reminding him that there was no way to hide his physical condition through the link, any more than Owen could hide his worry. "Not too late to tap out, mate," Owen murmured.

"It's not like I'll be stronger next round," Ianto muttered back. "Better take my turn now, keep you in reserve for the next one, since the short rations aren't affecting you the same way."

"No talking," the guard snapped, waving the stun baton at them. 

"Oh, bugger _off,"_ Owen retorted.

"Of course it won't matter if you annoy them sufficiently beforehand," Ianto said conversationally as they stepped out of the lift and the roar of the crowd broke over them, making it easier to talk uninterrupted. "I hope I won't come back to find you with two broken arms because you couldn't shut up for five minutes."

"Would 'break a leg' be a completely inappropriate send-off? Given that you're a theatre man, and all."

"Yes, it's inappropriate! Christ, Owen."

"Then don't make me explain to Jack that I let you get killed," Owen said, and he grasped Ianto's arm, very briefly, a press of his cold fingers before the guards cut between them and Ianto had no chance to say anything else.

As they took him down the long walk to the floor of the arena, he tried not to think about the fact that there was a very real possibility he might have just had his last conversation with Owen. Well, if it _was_ a last conversation, at least it was largely true to form.

* * *

To Ianto's complete astonishment, he actually won his first bout. It happened mainly because he was up against someone who was even more terrified and worse at fighting than he was, a shortish humanoid with opalescent wings that didn't seem to be able to support its body weight. It had claws, and Ianto took some painful gouges across the backs of his hands and his forearms, but then it fell on its back, curled up in terror. "Yield, yield!" it wailed.

"I accept," Ianto said. The alien looked relieved for an instant before it spasmed all over, limbs curling up in obvious agony. At the same time Ianto felt a muted ripple of some odd, faintly tickly sensation. 

Ah. Their linked partners had just been electrocuted. Not really that much of a problem in Owen's case — and just as Ianto was thinking that, there was a sharp jolt through his left hand, not pain so much as a dry snapping feeling.

They had just broken one of Owen's other fingers.

"You bastards!" Ianto screamed. His entire limbic system was awash in Owen's terror and misery and fury, as well as his own incandescent rage. He sucked in a shuddering breath and got himself under control, more or less, and looked down at the terrified humanoid on the sand. Its face was streaked with tears. It was easier to make plans for dramatic showboating when he wasn't confronted with an actual living person he was going to have to fight and injure. "Let's make it look good, yeah?"

The creature snarled, showing a flash of fangs, and jumped at him.

"Too convincing!" he yelped. "Not this much!"

He hit the sand hard, with the creature on top of him, jarring his injured ribs in a moment of breathless, blinding pain. It buffeted him around the head with its wings, snarling and frantic.

It was attacking mainly in terror; he knew that, but it didn't help much when he was trying to keep from having his face clawed off. For a few minutes they scrapped with each other, the creature biting and clawing, Ianto mainly just trying to keep it away from his neck or any other tender parts.

He broke its wing by total accident; he hadn't realized how fragile it was. It rolled away from him on the sand, keening, and Ianto struggled to his feet. He hurt all over, old hurts and fresh ones; there was blood dripping from his arm. But mainly he felt sick to his stomach. It took him a moment to pull himself together enough to reach for his staff and point it at the shrieking alien.

"Yield," he said thickly.

Instead of saying anything, it went abruptly limp. Horrified, Ianto knelt down and felt for a pulse. There was one, rapid and fluttering in its throat. It was either playing dead or had passed out from the pain.

He struggled to his feet, using the staff like a cane. The crowd cheered and booed in equal measure, and Ianto stood tense and aching with nervous anticipation — he could feel the same from Owen — until the guards came out and hauled the creature's limp body away.

_I won? I think ..._

He looked around. The crowd was still loud, but not off their heads. Up there in the stands, Ianto saw people drifting off for drinks or snacks between bouts. There was a sort of waiting feeling.

He leaned into the link, trying to get a feel for how Owen was doing. In general he was glad the link didn't include actual telepathy, but right now he really wished they had some kind of two-way communication. Owen's feelings were a muddle of low-key distress, rage, and worry, but at least the guards didn't seem to be actively doing anything to him, and he wasn't in pain ... aside from sharing the stinging of the new cuts and claw marks on Ianto's hands and arms. The slightly _off_ feeling of the freshly broken finger was a new discordance that Ianto couldn't help being aware of, and he wondered how much of his own protective anger Owen was currently feeling.

Bastards.

They kept him waiting for what felt like a long time, but was probably only a few minutes, before the announcer began announcing the next bout. Ianto listened, but he couldn't tell much from the breathless announcements, except that it sounded like the betting was intense and his new opponent had a long string of wins.

The doors to the arena slammed open. Ianto gripped his staff as a figure loomed in the doorway and then lumbered onto the sand.

"Jesus," he muttered.

It was as big as the crocolorries — no, taller, at least twice as tall as a human, if not bigger than that — and looked like it was made out of chunks of rock. Built like a brick wall, literally. Two legs, two long arms, sort of gorilla-like. Eyes glittered in its flat, bulbous head when it looked around, the only sign that it wasn't an animated statue. The staff looked like a toothpick in its massive hand.

The crowd went wild. Apparently this one was a crowd favorite. Wonderful: another tick in the minus column for him.

It didn't show any particular inclination toward theatrics, merely lurched toward him, staff in the ready position. God, it was _huge._

_I'm going to die out here._

It lumbered toward him. He braced himself, shoes sliding in the sand, and then gave up and kicked them off one at a time, leaving him in his sock feet. He'd probably never get the shoes back, and that bothered him — he liked keeping track of things, should have left those in the cell too — but at least he had better maneuverability this way.

Strangely enough, Owen didn't actually seem that worried, or at least cautiously optimistic. _Great, YOU can be down here, fighting this thing._ Though, in fairness, Owen _had_ offered. 

Ianto thought of that monstrous thing shattering Owen's limbs, breaking things that would never heal, and fought off a shudder. Not that he wanted it breaking _his_ limbs either, obviously. How was he supposed to take out something like that? He couldn't tell if it had any weak spots he might be able to attack. It just seemed to be made out of rock, or a rocklike exoskeleton, anyway.

He had a sudden surge of memory of a quote from the movie _Galaxy Quest_ , which he'd watched with his sister years ago. _It's a rock! It doesn't HAVE vulnerable spots!_

That movie wasn't supposed to be _research,_ he thought, with a surge of weary irritation for everything his life had become. 

The rock alien — _may as well call it Rocky, why the hell not_ — broke into a lumbering run as it approached him. Its giant rock-feet were sliding in the sand even worse than Ianto's shoes, which he noticed with interest. He'd been too panicked while fighting the centaur to notice if she had the same problem.

Meanwhile, with his sock feet getting traction, he was faster and lighter and more maneuverable. Rocky swung its staff at him with more speed than he was expecting — its large size made it look slower than it really was — but he still dodged with relative ease.

Huh, he thought, surprised, as he recovered his footing in the sand and whirled around, trying to ignore his aching ribs giving him a sharp twinge. As long as he stayed focused, he might have a pretty good shot here.

Except ... he had absolutely no idea how to beat this thing. He didn't even know if it _could_ be beaten.

_But you don't have to. Showboating, right?_

It slid around in the sand, getting oriented on him again. It didn't seem particularly bright. He wasn't even entirely sure if it was sentient. Then again, one didn't really need to be a quick thinker when one was an invulnerable rock monster.

Heart pounding, Ianto tensed as it thundered at him again. He stuck his staff upright in the sand and let go — wasn't like it would help him now — and bent his knees, tensing to move.

He could feel Owen's curiosity in the back of his mind, wondering what he was up to.

Rocky swung a massive fist at him. This time, rather than dodging, he ducked between its legs. There was a moment of absolute panic with those great pillars thudding on either side of him, and then he was behind it. It threw on the brakes in a shower of sand, and Ianto jumped and caught hold of the rough rock on its back while his ribs and all his muscles screamed.

He'd done a small amount of bouldering, years ago. Now he tried to let his muscle-memory kick in, while scaling a living, heaving boulder that kept trying to twist around to see what was on its back. Like a human, it couldn't reach back there. In fact, its limbs were even stiffer ( _well, rock, right)_ and it didn't seem to be able to move them back at all, or do more than cock them up in a half-bent position over the shoulder. It swept at its back with the staff as if using a back scratcher. Ianto ducked. Despite all odds, despite the terror and the pain of his ribs and the sweat stinging his cuts and trickling into his eyes ... he was having a petrified, panicked sort of fun.

Part of that was probably Owen, the bloody endorphin junkie. In Ianto's head, Owen felt exhilarated and tingly, clearly enjoying the sympathetic adrenaline rush.

And the crowd was absolutely going wild, cheering and roaring with laughter and whoops of delight and a variety of other sounds, the clattering and smacking and hissing of dozens of different kinds of appendages and throats expressing pleasure. _They love this,_ Ianto thought. He flattened himself to the rock creature's back as it made another wild swipe with the staff. The centaur lady was right. The crowd just wanted a show. They loved blood sport, but would also take pratfalls and acrobats, or any other sort of entertainment the arena combatants wanted to throw their way.

Which was how it had been in Ancient Rome too, wasn't it? He'd read that somewhere: the Roman gladiators had been celebrities, wined and dined and fêted, cheered by screaming fans. They risked death in the arena, but footballers and wrestlers had been known to suffer fatal injuries, too.

There was turning out to be a flaw in his plan, though. He wasn't sure how to jump off without being stomped. And it was only a matter of time before Rocky managed to hit on a strategy to —

Ah. Right. The rock giant dropped to one knee with a heavy thud, and kept going down, rolling over. Ianto managed to spring away and sprawled ungracefully in the sand an instant before several tons of rock flopped belly-up right where he'd been a moment ago.

The roar of the crowd was deafening, but as Ianto picked himself up, aching all over with sand stinging his cuts, he realized that his brief moment of enjoyment had vanished. He would have been crushed just then if he hadn't made it away in time. And Rocky was struggling back to its huge feet. It would win eventually just by wearing him down.

Ianto made a dash for his staff. There was a hushed breath as the crowd waited to see what he would do next, the wall of noise pulling momentarily back like a tsunami drawing away from the shore — and in that hush, he heard a thread of sound from above, Owen yelling at the top of his lungs: "Hit it in the gonads!"

"It's a rock!" Ianto yelled back, circling as the rock giant got its bearings. "It hasn't got any!"

"Everything does!" Owen shouted down.

"You sure about that?"

He fumbled with the shaft of the staff — he could almost hear the innuendo from Owen in his head — and managed to get the blade to slide out of the end, two feet of steel popping out with an audible _Spang!_ Not what he wanted, though. He knew the blade wouldn't do anything. What he wanted to know was whether Rocky was vulnerable to electricity.

Ah. There. The tip of the staff made a sharp snapping sound, and Ianto's shoulder twinged in memory.

Rocky thundered toward him. Ianto held his ground until the last minute, then thrust upward, mindful of Owen's suggestion — and it _was_ a good one; if anything was vulnerable on that behemoth, it was probably either between the legs, or up on the head.

The staff rammed up into the joint between its thigh and body. Ianto was dragged half off his feet. He squeezed the control studs, heard an electric snapping sound, and then the staff snapped in two and he was flung to the ground. He scrambled wildly away as huge feet thudded much too near him, dropping the other half of the staff. When he made it to his feet, it was just in time to duck a haymaker swing from Rocky, lurching around with half of Owen's staff jutting out of its groin and not looking overly bothered by that.

"Thanks for the helpful suggestion!" Ianto yelled in the general direction of the stands. He'd completely lost his bearings and had no idea where Owen was up there.

He was getting winded, and he wasn't sure how much longer he could hold out. Worse, the crowd's wild cheering was starting to fade into bored and restless muttering. They were losing interest.

What was a rock monster vulnerable to? Not bloody much, was the problem.

The head, though. There were eyes up there. Ianto spotted the blade half of his dropped staff, and ran for it, dodging another swing from Rocky.

Even if you were made out of rock, having two feet of sharp steel poked in your eyes couldn't be good for you. He just had to get up there again.

It had been easier the first time, in part because he didn't know what he was doing and couldn't dread it. Also, he'd had a bit of fluky luck, he realized after making a couple of runs at it. Each time, he missed his window, once nearly getting stepped on, then almost taking a blow that would have broken his neck.

He was gasping now, sweat trickling in his eyes — at least he hoped it was sweat and not the cut on his forehead breaking open with all the wallowing around in sand. Owen's tightly wound tension and anxiety in the back of his mind wasn't helping. "Think soothing thoughts, arsehole," Ianto muttered to himself, backing off for another go at it.

He'd caught a pterodactyl, damn it. He fought and won against a psychotic version of Lisa. He'd fought thugs with guns, and monsters, and Weevils. He wasn't going to lose to a _rock._

Rocky lumbered toward him. It never seemed to tire or grow bored or try a different strategy. It just kept swinging those massive fists, having given up entirely on the staff by now. And really, there was no reason for it to do anything different. It probably won every fight this way.

Ianto waited until the last minute, jinked left, and then dashed around its massive legs. It was ready for him this time, sort of, and stumbled to a stop, bracing its legs with one of them going down to the knee. Excellent — a step. Ianto jumped and grabbed for its bouldery back, had a moment of panic when he realized abruptly that it was impossible to rock climb while holding something in one hand, and tucked the staff between his teeth instead. This would never have worked with the entire staff, but broken in half, it was just manageable.

Rather than standing up again, Rocky thumped down on all fours. Right — it had figured out how to get him off before. And apparently was smart enough to remember. As Rocky rolled over, Ianto scrambled over its shoulder onto the massive gorilla-like chest, and stabbed the staff-blade down at its eyes.

It could possibly have worked, but his aim was bad, and rather than going into the eye socket, his blade bounced off the heavy, stony brow ridge. The blade skidded down the side of Rocky's face, making a shrieking metal-on-rock sound, and then Rocky punched him in the head.

His head snapped sideways and his entire body followed. He didn't lose consciousness entirely, but things grayed out. It didn't even hurt, exactly, but there was a massive sense of _wrong_. He thrashed, uncoordinated, managed to collect his limbs under him, stood up and immediately toppled over. Even lying down, the world spun, sickening and dizzying, around him. 

His vision went in and out, but in the blurred glimpses, something big loomed over him. A massive stone foot. 

There was something he needed to say. He tried to remember it.

"Yield," he choked out. His mouth tasted like blood; he hoped it was only that he'd bitten his tongue. The world was still spinning; he was on a carnival ride that wouldn't stop. "I yield. I yield!"

The great foot filled his vision, doubling and blurring and coalescing into one again. And then it thumped down beside his head, jarring him deep into the gray.

* * *

He didn't pass out entirely. That would have been more merciful. He was just conscious enough, fading in and out, to be aware of the jolting misery as he was dragged back to the cell. He had a vague awareness of Owen sharing his queasy disorientation.

They dumped him on the floor. He struggled to get to his hands and knees, and immediately fell over again.

"Jesus, would you stop fucking _moving,"_ Owen groaned from somewhere nearby.

The world was impossible to navigate; he couldn't tell up from down. He was dimly aware of Owen crawling over to him.

"Ianto? Fuck, fuck, fuck, _fuck._ Got your bell rung good, didn't you?"

There were hands on him, pulling and tugging. Ianto clutched at something that turned out to be Owen's sleeve. He clung to it, desperate for some point of stability in the spinning world.

"Stop trying to move, mate. It's doing you no favors. Either of us really. That lack of a gag reflex is really coming in handy right now," Owen added under his breath.

Ianto _wished_ he could stop moving. He drew in shuddering breaths. Every moment was endless; every moment was now. The world had turned to putty, nothing stable or steady, everything in constant motion. 

Hands turning his head. He tried to ask for it to stop, but nothing came out except a wordless noise.

"Sorry, sorry. Gonna look at your eyes now."

Light hurt. He screwed his eyes shut and turned his head blindly, seeking something, anything — he didn't know what. A way out of this.

"Make it stop," he whispered.

"Can't," Owen said, his voice and his emotions laced with misery, sharp and bitter. "God, you're concussed but good ... and what scares the hell out of me is you might have a skull fracture, and there's nothing I can fucking _do_ about it."

The words washed over Ianto, making sense in the moment, but fading into unintelligibility just after. He was wrapped up in something — Owen's coat — and half in, half out of Owen's lap. He hadn't been able to tell he wasn't flat on his back. He turned his head, pressed his cheek against the rough fabric of Owen's jeans.

Owen cursed softly, steadily, miserably. He threaded his fingers through Ianto's hair, and there was something hot and throbbing under there, something that seemed to let go with a wet _pop,_ and Ianto spun off into the gray.

* * *

Dream and wakefulness blurred together into a haze. Owen's feelings, angry and belligerent and grief-stricken and guilty, were a thread Ianto kept losing and finding again, a guide through a dizzy and exhausting maze. At one point, pure torch-bright rage jolted him back to an unpleasant waking, to the harsh ceiling light and Owen shouting at someone.

"— give me _something_ , God, you sociopathic fucks, a screwdriver to trepan him with would be better than the sod-all pile of _nothing_ I've got here, yeah I'm talking to you, you arse-faced piece of —"

There was a sharp electric snap and a scorching smell. Dead flesh could still burn, and Ianto lurched to his knees, but the gray turned hot red and that was it, he was gone —

... gone into feverish red and gray dreams, silver metal and flesh, blood and fire. But he found Owen again, or Owen found him ... they were huddled under both jackets, and Owen had an arm over him.

"Cold," Ianto whispered, through chattering teeth.

"Warmth is something I don't have to give, mate. I'm sorry," Owen said, quietly and sincerely. He pushed himself up on an elbow. "How's the mouth?"

"Mouth?" Ianto asked dazedly. There was a taste of blood on his lips. But that was from before, wasn't it? Maybe. Everything was a blur.

"You had a ... seizure." Owen's voice sounded like there was something caught in his throat. "Couple of 'em, actually. There was a lot of blood, thought you might've bit your tongue."

"I don't remember."

"Yeah. Don't worry about it." Owen rested a hand on the back of Ianto's neck. It hardly felt cold at all, which, Ianto thought muzzily, was probably a bad indicator of how cold _he_ was. He wasn't really shivering. Was that good or bad? Underneath everything, Owen's emotions were a pulsing current of anger and guilt and misery.

"It's not your fault," he whispered.

Owen's hand stilled. After a moment he said, while his emotions gave the lie to it, "The only ones whose fault it is that we're in this mess are those crocodile-faced fucks. If Jack shows up —"

"When," Ianto whispered.

"... When, yeah, _when_ Jack gets here, I'm looking forward to watching him cut a path through those fuckers to get to us."

"Sounds like him."

"Yeah," Owen said, with a little laugh. "Does, doesn't it." His grip tightened on Ianto's neck. "Think you could get a little water in you, by the way? I'd put in an IV if I had one, but ... chalk that up as one of the many things we don't have."

Ianto didn't really want it, didn't want to move in fact, because right now he hung in a precariously balanced equilibrium, with the sense that the slightest twitch might knock him out of orbit again. But he wanted to do it for Owen, in the hope that it would wipe some of that weary, guilty misery out of Owen's emotional state, so he tried to sit up and the world went away again.

* * *

He dreamed of Jack, beautiful and slightly scruffy — bending over him, smelling faintly of smoke, with a bruise on one cheekbone. Dreamed of Jack's lips warm against the cool skin of his forehead, as Jack murmured, "Can't stay out of trouble without me for five minutes, can you?"

It was a strangely specific set of details, he thought as Jack picked him up, the smoke smell stronger. There was a spot of plum-colored blood on the lapel of Jack's coat, and Jack's skin was very warm when Ianto turned his face into Jack's neck.

It wasn't a bad dream. He wouldn't mind more dreams like this.

* * *

For the first time in a long time, waking up didn't hurt. He wasn't cold or hungry or in pain. There were soft sheets under him instead of cold metal, and the only smells were soothing ones: disinfectant, and soap, and Jack.

That would be the warm, body-sized pillow pressing against him, then. He turned his head slightly, and very carefully, expecting pain, but there was none, just a dazed cotton-wool feeling. Jack's hair tickled his chin.

"Oh hi," Jack said, and raised his head. "Are you with us this time?"

"This time?" Ianto asked faintly. Everything felt distant and slow. There was a sort of ... not an ache, exactly, but a warm, heavy feeling in the side of his head. He started to raise his hand to touch it, but Jack caught his hand, trapping his fingers in Jack's stronger ones.

"Oh no you don't. You just spent almost a full Earth day in a Kel'hanar healing chamber. Don't go messing with their work, huh?"

"Kel ... hana," Ianto murmured.

"Kel'hanar. The ship we're on."

"Oh." Of course they were. Right now it all seemed to make perfect sense. 

Something else was different, though — an absence. It took him a moment to figure out what it was.

"Owen," he gasped, and tried to lurch off the bed. Jack caught him and held him down. It wasn't hard; he was terribly weak.

"Settle down. You aren't going anywhere yet."

"I can't feel him," he whispered, sinking back into the pillows.

"Look," Jack said, and turned Ianto's hand over, brushing his fingers lightly across the soft skin on the underside of the wrist — the soft, bare skin. The cuff was gone.

"Oh," he murmured.

"Owen is with Tosh and Gwen ... and yes, they're all here. They'll be in to see you later."

"Tosh and Gwen on a spaceship." What a thought. "How are they handling it?"

"Gwen is a bit overwhelmed. Tosh's main problem is that she wants them to show her everything and keeps having to be confined to quarters to get her to sleep."

"And ... the crocolorries?" he whispered.

Jack brushed the back of his hand down Ianto's cheek. "The whats?"

"The ... aliens. Where we were."

"Oh. You mean the Rionites." Jack's grin was feral, his eyes cold. "You might say the inmates are running the asylum now."

"Good," Ianto murmured, and wondered if the centaur and the fragile alien with the wings were among the survivors. "What'd you ... _do_ with everyone? Everyone who wasn't a prisoner, that is."

"There weren't that many crew. Most of the audience were holograms projected from their home planets; I don't know if you knew that or not."

Ianto started to shake his head, stopped just in time. As much better as he felt, he didn't want to push it; his head felt fragile right now, and only loosely tethered. "No. I hadn't realized."

"Not really room to accommodate that many guests, even on a ship that size."

"And their hospitality leaves something to be desired." He was already starting to flag again, slipping down into sleep. He fought it.

"Yeah," Jack murmured. He brushed a finger across Ianto's lips. "But they won't be doing it to anyone again. Rest."

Ianto fell asleep with his head pillowed on Jack's thigh and Jack's hand in his hair.

* * *

They were still several days out from Earth. From his bed in the ship's sickbay, of which he was currently the only resident, Ianto met the ship's doctor and her captain, both tall and silver-scaled, with long dark-green hair braided into elaborate styles that Jack said represented their social status and caste. He sampled their food, most of it eaten with the fingers: rolled-up tubes containing fish and grains, little dishes of sweet and tart sauces, and fish and sweets to dip in it.

He had visitors, Tosh and Gwen primarily, with Jack ever-present. Tosh's visits were warm but brief; she was busy elsewhere, wallowing in a Tosh wonderland of alien technology. Gwen, however, hung out in his sickbay berth for hours — sometimes you just wanted to see a friendly face, she said, stealing some of his fishsticks. (Apparently among the Kel'hanar, bringing protein to convalescents was the tradition.)

She also helped him look through records from the other ship (provided by Jack) until he found the people he'd met in the arena — the centaur, the winged person, even the rock monster — and reassured himself that they'd all survived to be rescued. He hadn't killed anyone, and the tangled ball of steel wool in his chest began to untangle and relax ... at least somewhat.

Because there was one lingering loose end. He hadn't seen much of Owen yet. Hadn't seen him at all, in fact. Owen had stopped in a couple of times, but always while Ianto was asleep.

"He's working on a project with Tosh," Gwen said, sitting on the end of Ianto's bed and monkeying with an elaborate metal puzzle-game that one of the Kel'hanar crew members had brought for Ianto to keep busy with. "Trying to reverse-engineer some piece of technology from the Rionite ship."

The emotion cuffs: it could be only that. "I would have thought he'd had enough of it."

But of course he hadn't. Owen had experienced a small taste of being alive again, even if he'd largely got the miserable and unpleasant bits due to the circumstances of their imprisonment.

"Hasn't he been down to see you?" Gwen asked, looking up from the puzzle. Ianto's expression must have said it all; she frowned. Jack, sitting on the opposite bed and doing some sort of paperwork on an alien tablet, glanced up.

"No reason for him to," Ianto said. "Not like he needs to check in on me every five minutes when he can get a report from you lot."

But that wasn't characteristic of Owen, in general. Normally when one of the team was hurt, he hovered. Not in any way that could be too obviously characterized as concern, at least Owen probably thought so, but he was always there: providing painkillers, checking stitches, complaining about their real or imagined failure to follow his medical advice.

And it hurt. A little.

They'd both had plenty of each other in the cell, he thought. Owen wanted some space. Understandable.

"Mmm." Gwen patted his leg and slid off the end of the bed. "I'll go mention to him that he might want to come see you."

"I can make it an order if I have to," Jack said.

"You don't have to!" Ianto said, to both of them.

* * *

But Owen wandered in later, when Ianto had just finished giving his lunch order to a very nice member of the kitchen staff — which mostly consisted of telling her to bring whatever she thought was good.

"Some of those little crunchy purple things," Jack said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, tickling his fingers lightly down Ianto's arm. "He likes those."

"Thank you, I can order my own food, Jack. And coffee!" he added. The one Earth food they had on this ship was real, honest-to-God Earth coffee. Jack had told him it was a popular export, illicitly smuggled and grown offworld. They had paid their way on the Kel'hanar ship with sixty pounds of French roast, and Gwen had brought along some of Ianto's private stash as well.

The kitchen staffer departed, and Owen slipped in as she slipped out. He hesitated when he saw Jack sitting on the edge of the bed, shoulder-to-shoulder with Ianto, but Jack raised a brow and Owen went ahead and sidled on in.

"Still alive then, how's the brain damage?" he asked lightly. The flippant, easy tone was belied by his body language: fidgety and tense, hands shoved in his pockets.

"I don't know, I can't remember," Ianto said. He wished he could see Owen's hands, check out the fresh damage for himself, but at the same time he was almost glad he couldn't.

Owen acknowledged the joke, such as it was, with a lip curled into a faint sneer. He slid a hand out of his pocket and picked up the puzzle Gwen had left on the foot of the bed, and Ianto had his opportunity to look at it after all. It was bandaged cleanly and neatly: with two broken fingers, now, splinted to a third. Ianto looked away.

"No, but seriously, asking from a medical perspective," Owen said, his attention on the puzzle rather than on Ianto. "How is it?"

It was strange not being able to read all of the emotional undercurrents anymore. Everything Owen said was only the top of an emotional iceberg several layers deep. And Ianto couldn't see the iceberg anymore, could only guess at it.

"He's doing fine, but we're not sure if he'll be able to play the violin again," Jack said. Ianto coughed on a small laugh.

"Yes, that's definitely my biggest concern," Owen muttered, twisting two bits of the puzzle.

"It's healing," Ianto said. "What about you?"

Owen looked up, visibly surprised. "Me, what about me?"

"How are you?"

" _I_ wasn't the one who got my face kicked in by aliens."

 _No,_ Ianto thought, looking at him, _but that doesn't mean you're all right. Far from it._

He had no chance to ask more, because Tosh burst in, with Gwen right behind her. "I finished it!" Tosh declared in delight. "We just tested it in the lab, me and Gwen. It works!"

She was carrying two bulky dark bands, and slapped one into Owen's palm. They didn't look quite like the ones on the arena ship; they were more obviously based on a mix of alien and Earth tech, with glimmering blue lights that were more reflective of Tosh's usual tech than the Rionite version.

"It works," Owen said, turning it over in his hands.

"That's right. I wouldn't suggest using it too often, since we're not sure about the psychological effects of mixing emotions like that. But it _does_ work." She grinned. "Do you want to test it?"

Owen hesitated, then fastened it around his wrist. It was weird seeing one that went on and off with a regular watchlike band rather than sealing perfectly and seamlessly.

Just being in close proximity to the thing made Ianto's mouth go dry. And yet, he heard himself saying, "Can I be the other test subject?"

Owen looked up sharply. Tosh looked slightly disappointed, but she was far too flush with triumph to let it dim her spirits much. "Well, if you want to ... sure!" 

She held it out to him. Ianto took it from her carefully. It was slightly warm to the touch.

"You just fasten it on like so ... and there's nothing but an on-off toggle right now. We'll add more controls later, once we've tested it more."

"Thought you would've had enough of being in my head by now." Owen said it with his usual cocky belligerence, typical Owen, but Ianto had seen enough, by now, of what lay under that to tell how much insecurity that cockiness was covering up.

"It's more that I've built up a tolerance by now," Ianto said. He carefully fastened the band around his wrist. "Can't expect someone without immunity to handle a full dose of unfiltered Owen."

Tosh looked uneasy at this, as if she wasn't sure if he was joking; even Jack looked slightly uncertain, but Owen merely rolled his eyes. "Can't get enough of this, can you? Better watch out, Harkness."

"Somehow I don't think I have anything to worry about," Jack said, his shoulder resting warm against Ianto's.

Ianto brushed his thumb lightly over the button Tosh had indicated, not quite touching it. "Any chance of side effects?"

"Other than having Owen in your head?" Jack said.

"Ha ha," Owen said. He looked up, reluctantly meeting Ianto's eyes. "Shouldn't be. We've tested it pretty extensively in the lab; we just didn't have a live test model yet. Should have known Tosh wouldn't let us down."

Tosh preened happily, but Ianto hesitated, thumb on the button.

"You okay with this?" he asked quietly.

Owen's gaze skittered away from Ianto's, which was answer enough, but he said sharply, "Ready if you are," and pressed the button on his device.

Ianto hesitated a moment more, but it was done, the decision made, no way really to back out, so he tapped his, too.

There was a slow washing-in of Owen's emotions, very faint compared to the intensity of the original alien device, but still identifiable enough, especially since Ianto had some practice now at deciphering Owen's various tangled-up feelings. The intensity of guilt and shame and worry was something he was halfway prepared for, given how blatantly the _bloody idiot_ had been avoiding the sickbay, combined with nervousness and annoyance-anger- _whyisthistakingsolong_ — but then, as the link stabilized, there was a quick bright flare of happiness, a pure single silvery note that made Ianto grin. 

Owen gave him a look, with a gray tide of _nervous-regretful-annoyed_ washing in to muddy his happiness. 

And Ianto caught on, then, to the rest of it: Owen _wasn't_ used to people knowing how he felt; he didn't like it, didn't trust it, didn't think anyone would want anything to do with him once they'd seen inside his head, even in this dim and filtered peephole-window kind of way.

"Don't be a prat," Ianto said out loud, and everyone else jumped, which made him realize that for the last few seconds he and Owen had been having a purely nonverbal conversation conducted solely in emotions, while the others stared at them in burning curiosity.

"It works?" Tosh asked, all but bouncing on her toes.

"It works," Owen confirmed, twisting the device on his wrist, a mix of continued uncertainty and general free-floating annoyance bleeding into the link. But whatever he was getting back from Ianto was making him relax somewhat. "It's great, Tosh, really good work — And scratch your arm, you twat, it's driving me mental." 

Ianto wanted to laugh, settled for a slight grin instead — he hadn't even noticed the itch, but he rubbed his thumb over the place where the sleeve of the Kel'hanar scrub-top was tickling his arm, and Owen sagged a little, with a worryingly intense emotional bleedthrough of pleasure. 

"This is ..." Jack began, and was apparently lost for words.

"Weird," Gwen said.

"Hold still, hold still," Tosh said, and ran a scanner over both of them, while Ianto obediently held out the arm with the device, and Owen went nervously tense. She flashed them both a bright grin. "It seems to be running smoothly. I can't detect any measurable side effects — no effects at all, actually, except for the energy output from the device. You're sure it's working, though?"

"Yes," they said together, and then gave each other a look.

"Right," Owen muttered, giving the device a tug. "This is coming off now."

"If you want to," Ianto said, "but they were just going to bring lunch. You haven't had a chance to try Kel'hanar food yet."

Owen stopped with his thumb underneath the device's buckle.

* * *

One thing the Kel'hanar really liked to do was feed people, which meant that Ianto's lunch came on about four trays and easily had enough to feed everyone already in the room. (Plus coffee, glorious coffee.)

Ianto tried a little of everything — it was really no hardship — with the team sprawled around the room, eating and chatting: Tosh had ideas for improving the device, and Gwen had been up on the bridge earlier because the captain wanted to show her a supernova, and was overflowing with fascinated delight about it. Jack soaked it all in, and Ianto couldn't help thinking about _other_ uses for the device (but crushed it as ruthlessly as possible, because he didn't particularly want Owen getting hold of that particular bit of fodder for teasing him with, let alone Tosh finding out about it).

And Owen sat on the end of the bed, working on the Kel'hanar puzzle and thinking warm contented thoughts, laced with little thrills of delight when Ianto tasted something he particularly liked (Ianto filed those ones away for later), and sending involuntary affectionate thoughts in his direction, with hardly the slightest hint of bitterness or anger or insecurity at all.


End file.
